Treading Lightly: Selected Poems 1961-1975

by Jacques Réda, Jacques Reda, Jennie Feldman (Translation)

The first English selection of Jacques Réda's poems draws on his earliest major collections, widely regarded as among his Amen , awarded the Priz Max Jacob, 1968; Récitatif , 1970; and La Tourne , 1975. These were a formative influence on the new lyricism' that was to change the direction of French poetry in the 1980s. With an eye for detail and drama, his poems roam from day-to-day Paris to other times and places, striking a wry, pensive note that is at once personal and universal. They will appeal to readers who share Réda's belief that poetry lives through its rhythm, or better still, le swing' (he is a respected jazz critic). The music is admirably captured in Jennie Feldman's translations. Jacques Réda, born in 1929, was awarded the French Academy's Grand Prix in 1993 for a lifetime's work. In 1978 he became a member of Gallimard's reading panel; he was editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française' from 1987 to 1995. His prose work The Ruins of Paris appeared in translation by Mark Treharne in 1996. He received the Bourse Goncourt de la Poésie in 1999. Jennie Feldman studied French at Oxford. Her first collection of poems The Lost Notebook is also published by Anvil. She lives in Haifa, Israel.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published November 1, 2005

About the author

Jacques Réda was a French poet, jazz critic, and flâneur. He was awarded the Prix Valery Larbaud in 1983, and was chief editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française from 1987 to 1996.

Reviews

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jacques Réda reminds me of a French Adam Zagajewski, singing amidst the rubble of history, writing psalms of praise without believing in any God to whom they might be addressed. These are poems of light and shadow; cobblestone and countryside; loss, promise, and revenant longing--all marked by a pervasive secular mysticism, an "amen" that can't quite muster an "alleluia."

The English-speaking world is indebted to Jennie Feldman for bringing out this first book-length collection of translations (drawn from Réda's early work, 1968-75). She tackles the rich vocabulary with which the poet renders the world in such palpable detail and manages knotted syntax and French idiom with admirable skill. For example, she takes the nervous chattiness that flutters up in these lines--

"Des fenêtres de l'hôpital on avait vue
À vrai dire ma foi vraiment belle sur ces collines..."

--and renders the tone just right without being slavishly literal:

"From the hospital windows there was a view
Really such a lovely view you know over those hills..."

Or she brings the very long "La fête est finie" to a close with these rhythmically satisfying lines:

"Could her honey shoulder be another day beginning,
Her silence the space where birds will burst forth?"

The musicality of the translations comes and goes, however. At the end of "Je montais le chemin quand j'ai vu d'un côté," Feldman gives us

"That's when it's good to go walking with tobacco in your pocket
For later, and to kick through these bones and metal scraps on ploughed fields
While the sun rows low to leave the whole field free for its light."

That last line is perfect--or it would be if it weren't for the clunky repetition of the word "field" from the line before it. (The original uses two different words, "labours" and "champ.") "Ploughed fields" is an accurate translation of "labours," but the poem's music pays a high price.

Feldman renders all of the poems in free verse, even though about a fifth of the originals are written in rhyme and meter. This too is a choice I'll quibble with, a choice to ignore the poems' music.

Still, given the limited ambitions of the translations, the book still provides a great service. It gives us the poems in their original form along with a reliable trot to guide us through them. And occasionally that trot breaks out in a dance.

[Ulrike Barkan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Treading lightly
I so enjoyed the sensitive yet powerful translation of Jacques Réda's poems by the truly dedicated translator Jenny Feldman. The fact that she is a highly talented and estimated author herself, is strongly tangible in the natural melody she managed to create as a twin or mirror image to the original French poem in both prosody and meaning . Reading and digesting the compressed and rich expression of Réda not in the original language, I feel that the eloquent use of her vast English vocabulary makes is a treasure in its own right. I loved the part in Amen where "ash kisses ash" , a culturally colorful and touching expression, instead of just letting ash embrace ash. In Feldman's sophisticated but earthbound use of the immense amount of beautiful English words she manages to take our hand and lead us into Réda's refined thoughts and subtle understandings of his inner universe. I am grateful for the opportunity to be exposed to the magic of this French author.
Ulrike Barkan